Form validation with Conform, Zod, and Remix

This article was written for Remix 2, which has been merged into React Router 7. Some changes may be necessary.

Conform Check out the Conform docs is a form validation library that helps you build forms with serverside validation and client-side error handling. It works really well with Remix and Zod.

With Conform, you can represent your form schema with Zod.

import { z } from "zod"
 
const schema = z.object({
  title: z.string(),
  description: z.string().optional(),
  status: z.enum(["todo", "doing", "done"]),
})

In your form component, use Conform's useForm hook to get the props you need to make your form work.

The onValidate method is where we'll make it use the zod schema.
The lastSubmission prop takes the response from the action so it can handle errors for us.

import { conform, useForm } from "@conform-to/react"
import {
  getFieldsetConstraint,
  parse,
} from "@conform-to/zod"
 
export default function Example() {
  const actionData = useActionData<typeof action>()
 
  const [form, fields] = useForm({
    id: "example",
    onValidate({ formData }) {
      return parse(formData, { schema })
    },
    lastSubmission: actionData?.submission,
    shouldRevalidate: "onBlur",
  })
 
  return ( … )
}

Next, we'll use the fields object to get the props we need for each field in our form.

Pass form.props to the <Form> component.
Each input gets an HTML id generated automatically. Pass fields.title.id to the htmlFor prop on the <label> to attach it.
Pass conform.input(fields.title) to the <input>

Each input gets its own list of errors in fields.title.errors.

export default function Example() {
  const [form, fields] = useForm({ … })
 
  return (
    <Form method="POST" {...form.props}>
      <div>
        <label htmlFor={fields.title.id}>
          Title
        </label>
 
        <input {...conform.input(fields.title)} />
      </div>
 
      <div>
        <label htmlFor={fields.description.id}>
          Description
        </label>
 
        <input {...conform.input(fields.description)} />
 
        {fields.description.errors ? (
          <div role="alert">
            {fields.description.errors[0]}
          </div>
        ) : null}
      </div>
 
      <div>
        <label htmlFor={fields.status.id}>
          Status
        </label>
 
        <select {...conform.select(fields.status)}>
          <option value="todo">Todo</option>
          <option value="doing">Doing</option>
          <option value="done">Done</option>
        </select>
      </div>
 
      <button type="submit"> Submit </button>
    </Form>
  )
}

The last step is to create an action that will handle the form submission.

Use the parse method from @conform-to/zod with your schema
A failed submission will have an empty value property, so you can use that to handle errors. Return the submission object in the response so the form can display the errors.
If the submission is valid, you can use the value property to get the data you need to enter into your database.

import { parse } from "@conform-to/zod"
 
export async function action({ request }: ActionFunctionArgs) {
  const formData = await request.formData()
  const submission = await parse(formData, { schema })
 
  if (!submission.value) {
    return json(
      { status: "error", submission },
      { status: 400 },
    )
  }
 
  const { title, description, status } = submission.value
 
  await db.todos.create({
    title,
    description,
    status,
  })
 
  return redirect("/todos")
}